Minsk Group diplomats meet with NKR leadership in Stepanakert. Bako Sahakyan: "Attempts to return to the past are doomed to failure."

In response to Israel's policy of occupation and destruction, around one hundred former representatives of France and the United Kingdom urge their governments to act through a series of sanctions aimed at safeguarding the rule of law. A coalition of 102 former French and British diplomats is calling on their countries to jointly sanction Israel, warning in an open letter that Israeli policy in occupied Palestinian territory threatens to permanently erase the possibility of a Palestinian state. France and the United Kingdom “must act together to uphold international law in Palestine”, said the letter published on Saturday by French outlet Le Monde. It urged the two governments to push for “equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians”. The signatories include former British ambassadors to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock and Emyr Jones Parry, and former French Middle East directors, Yves Aubin de la Messuziere and Denis Bauchard, drawing on decades of diplomatic postings across the region. “Palestinian house demolitions and rampant settler violence – with the connivance of the Israeli army and police – amount to ethnic cleansing,” said the letter. “The world no longer sees Israel as a genuine democracy,” it added. Such language, said Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Iran, Qatar and Yemen and one of the signatories, was not invented by the diplomats themselves. “The words are not our own,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are taken from the international legal bodies, the UN, those who have been observing from a neutral position and with expertise.” (click image to read in full)

Rescuers in Ukraine are continuing their search for survivors in the wreckage of a big shopping centre hit by Russia on Friday. Sixteen people were killed and 130 injured when two drones hit the busy centre in Kryvyi Rih in quick succession in what is known as a double-tap strike. Four people are still missing. The search and rescue operation could last for another two days. President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the "cynical and despicable" attack in which the second drone targeted emergency workers. The sides exchanged more fire overnight, with Ukrainian attacks said to have killed at least four people in Russia, including two children, and three people reported dead by Kyiv as a result of Russian strikes. The death toll from Friday's attack reached 16 after another body was retrieved from the rubble overnight, said Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha. "We're doing everything possible to speed up... the search and rescue operation," he told Ukrainian TV on Saturday morning. (click image tio read more)